A family from Arkansas discovered a complete stranger living in their basement — after noticing missing items and moved furniture.
Dutch Hoggatt, a professor at Harding University, said he first became suspicious when his shoes, which he leaves daily at the back door at their home in Searcy, suddenly vanished.
“I asked my wife if she had thrown them away, and she had not,” Hoggart told KHTV. “Over time, we noticed that chairs had been moved around in the house. We noticed that some of our food was missing.”
Hoggart’s daughter, Cherisse Gregory, her husband Mark, and Hoggart’s wife Sharon — armed with a baseball bat and gun — decided to search the house on Wednesday, April 29.
When Sharon entered a storage area under the basement stairs, she was terrified to find a person there.
“She went further into the closet, and that’s when I saw her eyes get really big,” Mark recalled. “She starts to back out, and she says, ‘There’s someone in there. I see their leg, or their jeans, or something.”
Mark, with a bat in his hand, demanded that the man come out.
“I start hitting the door, or the frame, kind of just to scare him a little bit. And he finally says, ‘Okay, I’m coming, I’m coming,’” Mark said.
The family called the police, and the man, identified as 41-year-old Preston Landis, was promptly arrested.
He had been living in Hoggatt’s home for days, according to police.
He spent Monday night, April 27, in the family’s crawl space before moving into the unlocked basement the next day while the couple was out of the house.
He fixed himself a makeshift bed deep inside a storage closet down there.
The family, however, said there are no hard feelings and preached empathy.
“We’re not angry at this man,” Hoggatt said.
“I feel sorry for the man. I’m glad we figured out there was somebody living in the house, because this could have gone on for much longer than it did.”
Mark added, “There were plenty of opportunities where he could have taken things. It seemed like he was just trying to get out of the elements, trying to survive.”
Landis is charged with residential burglary and theft of property. He is being held on a $15,000 bond.
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